


perfection

by heartbreakage



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Shin Ankoku Ryuu to Hikari no Ken | Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon, Fire Emblem: Shin Monshou no Nazo | Fire Emblem: New Mystery of the Emblem
Genre: First Meetings, Introspection, Loyalty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:00:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27501946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartbreakage/pseuds/heartbreakage
Summary: the ideal of perfection, kris finds, is not found in the plurality of men but a single man
Relationships: Marth/My Unit | Kris
Kudos: 15





	perfection

**Author's Note:**

> another poor krismarth piece i toss to the pile u__u shippy? not shippy? u can decide

Long before he is knighted beneath the solid weight of the Hero-King’s ceremonial rapier, Kris is acquainted with a blurry image in the man’s likeness.

His grandfather, Maclir, had sought to inform him of what he could about his liege to-be prior to his departure from their village, but despite his long years of service in the Altean garrison could not claim much knowledge over the good prince. During his time in the castle, the kingdom’s heir apparent had been a piddling little boy with gaps in his teeth the last he saw of him. He had not seen him much at that unlike a few other trusted knights.

With a bit more prodding, grandfather pulled a thoughtful face and recalled aloud how the young prince had delicate features and a thin coltish body that his fretful handmaidens often hemmed and hawed over, which was not saying much as many young boys in their puerility often bore an appropriate fragility to their looks.

“You wish to know of his character as well? Hmmm, a right question for a knight seeking a proper liege..” Maclir had settled back in his wicker chair with a furrow between his brows, rubbing his chin absently. “He was soft, from what I remember. At least softer than his father, the then reigning Cornelius as you know, with a clear difference between them that often resounded with His Majesty’s disapproval. I could not tell you much more.”

That much was the surprisingly little extent of Maclir’s knowledge of his young master. But even if the circumstances had been different, surely the War of Shadows could change many conceptions about a prince that one thought they knew. The passage of many fast-flown years as well, to be sure. 

Kris could not blame him, and so he looked to other sources. 

* * *

Traveling bards reached even the quiet wayside rurality of the Sera village, and if not by them, then the awed rumors passed between travelers and villagers served just as well. Their words rang unanimously with the assertion that Prince Marth, the once fallen prince of their nation now proudly risen to triumph, was a star of stars.

The only one that could ever straddle the skies and command the onlooking gazes of men regardless of night or day.

“Our star and savior, chosen of the gods!” Bards trilled dramatically of Marth from atop their stools to the cheerful accompaniments of lutes, filling the local tavern with his praise.

Their outspoken reverence was a kind he has prior observed chorused only in the case of the divine warrior king. It was difficult to untangle these vast impressions from his mind, of a mortal man he has never seen. Even more difficult was it to believe them.

“During his time at the Pales, I shook hands with the lodestar as he passed by riding a white horse,” A ruddy-faced man guzzling away at at his seventh mug of ale drawled to a small but eager crowd with Kris amongst them. “And he’s exactly as you can imagine..”

Kris himself questioned the authenticity of the man’s experience, but more striking were the faces around him. Belonging not to overly enthusiastic children, but more grounded adults, who heeded even a drunkard’s words with wide eyes and open ears. Eager to believe so long as they were words bespoken in the name of their mythical savior of a prince.

“If he and Princess Caeda ever think to separate, he’d be quite the spoils for any maiden seeking a husband. We haven’t any of his sort out here in Sera, do we?” The village girls tittered like canards amongst themselves, louder as he passed.

This within itself drew a colorful roll of Kris’s eyes. 

Still. He had always wondered what all such descriptors could entail for a man, what he looked like and how his voice might sound. Things a song could touch upon but perhaps only with great lyrical inaccuracy, as was the way of bards who sung sagas to praise and be praised, and not quite to honor infallible truths about their subjects.

In that stride, he finds himself aloft his grandfather's old withering warhorse with nothing beyond the clothes on his back but their family broadsword and a few travel rations. Most of all, he's equipped with the means to draw his own conclusions.

* * *

A girl with aspirations, just like him, barrels into Kris before he takes a single step beyond the castles gates. As he steadies her by the shoulders, he learns her name to be Katarina and together, they trail a long line of hopeful visitors to the courtyard within.

As the grandson of Maclir stands before Altea Castle’s towering balcony with Prince Marth standing before him and his fellow squires in the flesh, Kris finds that what the sonnets and bards have extolled of the Hero-King had not been seeded with lies. Beside him, Katarina face upturns to the heavens just as eagerly for a good look at Archanea's messiah.

Shadowed on either side by his knights, and even from such a distance, it was easy to tell.

Marth was as fair a prince as all the blushing maidens had ever gossiped. Features arranged harmoniously in a well-bred face that hailed his high class. His tall fae nose with delicate nostrils seemed as any unrealistically perfect profile painted in portraiture, with modest lips below pressed into a more eye-catching smile.

A deep blue gaze, with a politician’s air, scanned the crowd evenly but with such unique warmth as to make every man, woman, and child in singularity feel as if they were someone worth remembering.

Objectively, he was beautiful, yes, but that is not nearly enough to bend his knee, Kris adjudges, until the man speaks.

 _Friends,_ the celebrated hero of Archanea curiously calls his knights, with a voice that dances in all the gentle tones of a man who truly believes he is surrounded by kind and familiar faces. Not strangers he has only met within the single day. Despite being quite young himself, perhaps mounted at the earliest years of his twenties at most, he preaches that Altea is in need of a young and promising new generation of guardians.

He's unable to tell if this is phrasing is a byproduct of his humility or personality, but Kris admires the prince in that moment. His vision for the future that lies in the ability of not one man, but many.

If there was any liege under whom a knight could make a proper name for himself, it would surely be this one.

That is all, Kris thinks at first.

* * *

The famed Hero-King could be every bit a king and every bit a hero, but more than anything, he is _human_ and Kris still could not see him as anything else. 

He's different from what all the grand rumors every reverent face and voice have thus far led him to believe. The true Marth is far kinder, Kris comes to find. A bit weaker, less impenetrable, and more.. Vulnerable. It's what the royal princess Elice confides to his ears alone during a chance meeting, coining her younger brother as an idealist who battles with a painful storm of his own self-awareness, and it's what Kris sees as well.

No king can be both human and god, and it is clear which side of the coin that Marth favors as he clings persistently to the sadness of all too necessary sacrifices. 

But there is a strength to him, too.

The straight plane to his back as he mourns the lives he couldn't save, promising to do better rather than wallowing in the past, or the personable chatter he spares for every subordinate who crosses his path on a free hour within his schedule. Ranking from the humblest stable-boy to the highest paladin, he sought seemingly to know them all, and his few but meaningful visitations to the training grounds showed this effort as well.

"Think nothing of my presence here, friends. Let it be as the slightest wind and the smallest shadow. I seek only to get a feel for the brave men and women who will fight alongside me on the battlefield," Marth smiles at the squires quickly dipping their sweat-slick heads and sticking their arms meekly to their sides upon his entry.

His kind gaze is steeped with eagerness as he personally assesses the improvement of his junior knights, although it was something any overseer could do in his stead.

Even more than when Sir Cain watches, he finds himself honing his blows more under his prince's accommodating stare, snapping the sword from Luke's hand with a clean slant of his blade rather than brashly beating it away as he usually did. The way grandfather always told him not to.

This favor of technique over might pays off because when he looks up, Marth is watching him with such pride as if he could call Kris's progress his own. If there is anything that the look goes to prove, it is that Kris has already made a name for himself as a golden apple amongst the fresh batch of Marth's recruits.

"Quite the maneuver, Kris, your way with the blade is truly fine to behold." 

The pride he feels in these words is the same as any hard-earned compliment Maclir could give at the completion of his most grueling training sessions. Except that even the few kind words that a hundred sundered logs or a dozen straw dummies cleaved in two could could earn did not quite compare.

"Show off in front of the great future paladin, Luke, will you..!" A more unfortunate Luke hotly says, humiliated at being trounced in the eyes of his liege and buckles him with a low kick to the backs of his knees. 

He could very well avoid it, but he takes the fall. If only because something within Marth's merry eyes raises his spirits higher than the heavens.

* * *

"Eat and sleep well everyone. Tomorrow will be a spectacular cause for celebration. I look forward to the lives we will lead together in the service of this kingdom and its people," says Marth at the front of the dining hall, nodding at each and every pair of eyes that catches his own, and Kris especially. When he leaves, the air clears and the butterfly-light excitement throbbing within their heartbeats evolves to a chorusing thunder of cheers.

Even as Luke twirls around with one arm each around an aggrieved Roderick and Cecil, Kris does not tear his eyes away from his prince's back. 

"Prince Marth is simply wonderful, isn't he?" Katarina breaks his lull reflectively, with an exuberance bright enough to even seem performative. "He truly cares for each and every one of his knights! I feel as if we'll have no greater pride than working alongside him as his royal guard."

Gathered around a long table clamoring with more than a dozen hungry mouths, he says nothing of it. To him, her excitement is all the same as any other peer. Even Kris, himself.

"If the salary he gives is as generous as his image, he'll be moooore perfect than he already is!" Luke crows in singsong beside them.

Kris smiles and responds to Katarina, anyway. "He's like a dream, in more ways then one. Fragile. Fleeting. We have to protect our king, Katarina, not simply work alongside him. That's the true duty of a knight that's been entrusted to us."

Amidst the thunder of excited voices in the mess hall, from both their seventh platoon and beyond, he can single out the quiet tinkle of her laughter.

"You know.. I think I can see why you were chosen as the platoon's captain by Sir Cain, Kris. You take your work a bit more seriously than all of us combined," she presses a hand to her playful smile, then pulls her fingers away and digs a gentle poke into his shoulder. "You're sweet on him, aren't you? Prince Marth has grown on you!"

"I wouldn't be serving him if he didn't," he responds instead, unthinking, dipping a spoonful of soup into his mouth then stopping. The garlic broth returns a small trickle into his bowl and Kris can only stare into his muddled reflection

Marth was the type of prince a knight could proudly serve, sure, but before he could realize it, there was already an answer to the question of whether he was one he could grow to love.

Kris does not even remember when it had been answered for him.

"..Are you alright, Kris? It wasn't something I said, was it?" Katarina's voice comes softly, with a questioning call of his name that hangs heavier than his silence.

The grandson of Maclir shovels the spoon into his mouth with a fervor speedy enough to take flight. 

"..It's nothing."

* * *

The ceremony that is to inaugurate them as formal knights of Altea, true but not yet tried, brings them into the dark fold of both a wiser and crueler experience.

Betrayal. From what Kris has learned of his prince during his short stay in the castle, his coming of age was wrought by the once allied Gra's betrayal and in a way, Katarina's own brings to him the very same. Just as that accursed war, death could be one end to the night and triumph could be another, but the chances of victory are slim with half the garrison pilled to an unsuspecting slumber by Katarina herself.

Even more, so too did assassins slink between the columns and shadows with their daggers, waiting to gut the Hero-King and his fresh-faced followers in one fell swoop. Stealing away the shining lives filled with promise and ending them before they have even begun.

Marth remains all too aware of these stakes. Older, wiser, and all too willing to sacrifice himself for the escape of a few fledgeling knights. Despite his promise to regroup later, they all know he cannot survive condemning his own ethics as he is; a prince who thrives by the support of many hands cannot bring about victory by merely his own.

"I'm sorry, everyone, that it has come to this," The look in Marth's eyes is truly grave, but even then he bears the fruit of a comforting smile. "The castle must be defended from the intruders at every due cost, but you need not worry. Though your grand ceremony has come to such an abrupt end, it won't be the same for your lives. I'll lead them away, so carefully make your escape."

_It's me they want._

They listen quietly, stunned, and Kris grinds the blunt edges of his nails into his palms without a second thought. 

Marth will _die._ Before Kris has even fitted the proud name of Maclir with achievements of his own.

Before Kris has gotten to know the only king he is convinced he could ever serve.

Marth's impossible sense of selflessness is the final nail in the long and weathered coffin of his skepticism. The fingers he clamps around his prince's wrist to stop him are instinctive and his words follow suit with the conviction of a new mind.

Because here, Kris finally believes that it is as the bards have said; the ideal of perfection is not found in the plurality of men, but a single man.

"Not at all, Prince Marth, there's no need for that. We'll fight our way out of this together."


End file.
